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Don’t Install Halo 3, Bungie Warns
Bungie has placed a notice on its forums which advises owners of Halo 3 to not install the game to the 360’s HDD due to “increased loading times”.
The new option to install 360 games onto the console’s hard drive was added as part of the NXE package. The key benefits of the service are the reduced wear and tear of DVD drives and, theoretically, faster loading screens.
Installing Halo 3, however, will significantly increase the game’s loading times, a quandary which Bungie has decided to speak out on.
Bungie Chief Caching Officer Mat Noguchi explains that the way Halo 3 works with a 360 HDD is the root of the problem: “When Halo 3 runs, if a HDD is present, we copy maps from the DVD to the utility partition on the HDD.” As a result, if players install Halo 3 to the 360’s HDD, the game will still go about its normal procedure of copying maps to the utility partition.
The slow loading screens occur here because a 360 HDD mechanism is being asked to do two things at once when Halo 3 loads. “You read and write through the same mechanism (i.e. the hard drive read/write head) and those reads and writes cannot occur simultaneously through a single mechanism," Noguchi explains.
Bungie has also revealed that it has no plans to administer a fix for the problem. “The risks of doing that and the resources required has to be carefully considered against what could really be a rather insignificant change to the player experience," Noguchi says.
Halo 3 is fine the way it is.
imding:
That's what the story said, the cost and risk of modifying that for only a portion of Halo players isn't worth it.
Yeah, I installed Halo 3 last night so I'll make sure I go ahead and delete it. Loads in Halo aren't bad any way and the campaign once the game loads the first level, there's never loading after that (unless you quit and start a different level).
I didn't know about this until reading it today. I do check bungie every friday so I would have found out by then, but you're right Jason, a lot of people won't know and be wondering why they're game is taking so long to load.
Well, thank God everyone who plays Halo 3 visits the Bungie forums everyday.
Okay, enough sarcasm. Maybe it's not Bungie's fault but end users need to know about the problem, and they shouldn't have to hunt down this kind of knowledge in forums or stumble across it in news posts. If fixing the issue is a major hassle (which I fully believe) then Microsoft should at least patch the installer so when users go to install Halo 3 they are warned that increased load times are a known issue.
It's not really their problem. It would cost them a good deal of money to fix a problem that Microsoft created for their game. Maybe it would be a different story if Microsoft was willing to forward the cash to get it done.
so they just told the public what's wrong and they're not fixing it?